10 Figures or Bust!

Once upon a time... back before the day of the video cassette recorded, and now of DVD, crossing over milestones used to be considered a very nifty thing in the film business, with real bragging rights attached to going over 100M or the like in your US or global box office.  Nowadays... (a) some of those milestones are much more easily attained just because of inflation, so getting to 100M doesn't mean what it did in 1980. (b) foreign box office has become so much bigger that more and more films are getting to very big figures for global box office  (c)  the video business is so much bigger that the studios care more about the best date to maximize the video revenue than dragging out an extra $592,982 or even $2,592,982 in theatrical box office revenue.

So I've been watching the global box office in Variety for The Dark Knight, which has slowly crept over $990,000,000 and getting every so close to the billion mark, but almost certainly coming just a little too short of it.  There was no way the movie would have bragging rights unless Warner Bros. decided to make certain that it did.

So I have to tell you a smile came to my face when I saw this article in Variety.  Even though the film will already have been out in DVD, Warner Bros. has decided there's still something to be said for having the bragging rights on being only the 4th film to make the billion mark in global theatrical box office.  I'd like to swear that I'd even see it again, though if my reading pile isn't in better shape then than now I'm not sure I can do the repeat business.

You can read my original blog post on The Dark Knight here.

How I Spent My Vacation From Blogging

OK, so it's been 4 weeks since my last post, and I'm not happy about that, but...

Business comes first, and November kind of got to be one of those months.

Shortly after my last post I headed down to DC to spend some quality time with Brandon Sanderson.  Brandon and I have spent fall quality time in DC for each of the last 3 years, and I've got to say it's pretty amazing to see how things have been coming along for Brandon over that time.  In years past we pretty much spent our time doing drive-by visits to bookstores to sign shelf stock and say "hello."  This was somewhat helpful in 2006, and it was possible to see Brandon's market share in DC increase in 2007 for the ELANTRIS and MISTBORN paperbacks, almost certainly as a direct result of those efforts.  In 2007, we visited just after the announcement of Brandon's work on the Wheel of Time series, and we had press releases to hand out.  We handed out enough that we had to stop at the Fed Ex Kinko's in Manassas to run off some more.  This year, we would go into stores like the B&N, Borders Express and Borders in Springfield, VA or the Borders Express in the Landmark Mall and we would find staff who remembered the visit from last year and were excited to see Brandon again or who had put him up on a staff rec or were happily hand-selling his work.  It was totally inspiring to see.  Brandon also had a great crowd for his signing at the Borders in Bailey's Crossroads, VA, which is a kind of special store in the DC area that Borders reserves for major author events.  I also watched Brandon keep two rooms full of high school students entertained with presentations, and t hat takes a real gift.  We also joined Tor's sales rep for the area for dinner with some of the people from DC's Politics and Prose, which is one of those really good indie bookstores that actually has a science fiction section with some people who pay attention to it.  If only they were a little closer to the Metro...

I raced back from DC the following Tuesday morning and made a cameo appearance in the office before heading to a dinner with the publisher of Recorded Books to celebrate the success of their unabridged audio Charlaine Harris publication program.  This was a really nice dinner at the Gotham Bar & Grill.  I'd never been, but it's a standby in NYC very highly rated in Zagat's and deservedly so.  It's a nice space, with excellent service, and really good food, and I'm glad I wasn't paying.  I may have to go at lunch when they have a prix fixe menu.

That left me two days in the office before I spent Friday and Saturday enjoying more quality time with Brandon on the NY stop of his tour.  This included a visit to Tor where I was recruited unexpectedly to appear in a wonderful video, after which Brandon pitched an idea for a new fantasy series to Tor's patriarch, Tom Doherty, and then Tom took Brandon and I to a nice Italian restaurant a couple blocks away where I tried some bitters.  Brandon's fall Tor concluded with his first NYC signing at the Barnes & Noble in Greenwich Village, which was another great turnout, and then we visited some more bookstores on Saturday, including the B&N in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Lisa had put Brandon's MISTBORN on a staff rec earlier in the year and was quite pleased to be able to meet Brandon in person.

Brandon isn't my only client, so after spending the better part of a week with Brandon, the week of the 17th was very busy at the office as I tried to give quality time to other clients and other matters requiring my attention, and then no sooner was that week over then it got to be  November 24 with the annual SFWA NYC reception.  I've been going to the SFWA reception every year since 1986 when I was a newbie agent who knewbied nobody, while it was the first visit for my associate Eddie Schneider and our intern Katherine.  

The next morning I was on an early train to Connecticut to begin my Thanksgiving holiday.  It was nice to have some extended time away from the office, and if I didn't get quite as much reading done as I had hoped, I did get to see Bolt with my nephews and play some Boggle and Frisbee and Monopoly and have a nice Thanksgiving dinner at one brother's and a nice Shabbat dinner at another's with time to visit some of the bookstores in the Hartford area.  One of the booksellers at the B&N in West Hartford had a staff rec for Tanya Huff.  

So it was a busy November.  

And it's just busy times at JABberwocky.  I feel a little bit guilty because I'm fortunate to have things going very well at the agency right now.  Brandon Sanderson, as above, is doing wonderfully.  Charlaine Harris and her Sookie Stackhouse books have skyrocketed in sales following True Blood more than any of us would have imagined.  All thanks go to Alan Ball for his great TV show.  But the TV show can get people to sample DEAD UNTIL DARK.  It's the books themselves that get so many of those people to decide to read the entire Sookie Stackhouse series, and it's a tribute to a really wonderful person in Charlaine Harris who's written a lot of really wonderful books that's made the  Sookie boxed set the #1-selling boxed set in the country the past three weeks.  Peter Brett continues to build ahead of his US launch for The Warded Man in March.  The one manuscript I did read over Thanksgiving was a new Paksenarrion novel by Elizabeth Moon, and it's so exciting to be back in that world 22 years after I first read the original Paks trilogy. Tobias Buckell is my latest NY Times bestseller (#4 trade paperback fiction) for his HALO: THE COLE PROTOCOL.   All this is happening here at a time when the economy as a whole is not in good shape, and publishing had a kind of Black Wednesday today with major cutbacks at Random House, S&S, Nelson, Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt, with steep drops in same store sales at B&N, Borders and Books a Million, and other grim things aplenty.  JABBerwocky isn't immune to all of this.  Looking over my Nielsen Bookscan #s, you can see a lot of books by a lot of my clients that dropped by 30% or 50% in their weekly sales numbers all of a sudden and very quickly in September and have since been establishing new and dramatically lower sales levels.  But I had more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than some other people, and it's hard not to feel guilty.

On some of those lower sales figures...  I don't envy the management of the bookstore chains right now who have some difficult issues to contend with.  Sales are falling, so you want to reduce inventory levels.  Now what do you do in early 2009 when you're planning after a difficult holiday season, and you have book #1 in a series by an established and popular author who is nonetheless being impacted by the economic climate?  If you use the same formulas to determine stock levels now that you did a year or 18 months ago, that may mean this book #1 is below the cut-off for being carried at some or all of your stores, and back it goes to the publisher, and there's logic to that.  But there's also a risk, because you're now making it harder to sell the next books in the series, and you're making a hole in your selection that might make your store less attractive as the customers start to return in the months to come, and let us all hope that 2009 will see some better times.  It becomes very challenging to figure out how to stay alive today without doing lasting harm to your future succes.  The decisions people make in Ann Arbor and NYC on questions like those will have a big impact for years to come on the big chains and on some of my clients.  And as good as things are going today, I do worry a bit about that.

One controversy I didn't chip in on in the blogging world...  My client Tobias Buckell did some posting on how the various chains were treating his new books.  You can read his 2nd generation post on the subject here.   (and find links in that post to some others by other authors.)  Blogger extraordinaire Andy Wheeler chipped in a few weeks later with a very insightful post.  You had calls for a boycott of Borders because Borders wasn't ordering every sf book by every author.  Yikes!  If there's one thing I pray for, it's that both Borders and B&N come through the difficult retail times we're in right now and survive and thrive in the future.  If you have a complaint about the world of bookselling today, you'll have many many more if there aren't two major chains around.  Simply put, both chains will sometimes do odd and inexplicable things, but they rarely do them at the same time with the same author, and if ever we don't have both to kick around it will be a very bad day.  Some examples:  Borders carries Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion omnibus which B&N does not, while B&N carries the trade paperback readers group edition of Elizabeth's The Speed of Dark, which Borders does not.  Borders might have skipped Tobias Buckell's Sly Mongoose, but as he has his success with Halo there are no B&N stores that are supposed to have his Ragamuffin paperback corporately speaking, while the book is being carried at the better f&sf locations for Borders.  Prior to the release of True Blood, B&N was more supportive over the years in terms of backlist risers and the like for the Sookie Stackhouse books, but after True Blood debuted it was Borders that took a more aggresive position on the Sookie books while the B&N mystery buyer was showering floor displays on Charlaine's non-Sookie books.  Borders has been much better than B&N to the Goblin books by Jim C. Hines, yet B&N has a more aggresive order in place for Jim's forthcoming novel The Stepsister Scheme.  B&N has done much better with the Greywalker novels by Kat Richardson, but Borders is currently better inventoried with Brandon Sanderson's Well of Ascension.  I could go on and on.

Now the success of the business is hitting my reading pile hardest.  The summer, the pile hardly budged at all.  In the past few months I've at least been making some progress, though after a stretch of time when few of my established clients were turning in new books, I'm now starting to get several of those that have to get put at the top of the pile which makes the other people have to wait that much longer.  That's perhaps the biggest obstacle to my blogging, that the hours I spend on this are hours I'm not spending reading manuscripts by authors who are waiting very patiently.  Still, I hope to find a little more time in December to tend to the Brillig Blogger.   But I promise I am trying as hard as I can while still having a life outside of work of some sort to get through my reading pile.  

Enough for now; I will try and have some movie reviews up over the next several days.

Dead Trees and Live Wires

There's nothing quite like reading a good newspaper the day after an election, and I was excited just anticipating the special election section that I hoped would still be part of my NY Times on Wednesday.  And there it was, or was it?  15 pages full of news.  A long article on the Obama campaign, analysis and results and pictures.  Reading galore that occupied me the entire way on an evening walk into Manhattan.  And then I could attack the Washington Post on my Kindle.  But where was the four page regional wrap-up of every single state's results?  Will those show up in tomorrow's paper when all of the results are actually in, or are they gone forever as being too yesterday's news that we've all long since found on the internet if we really really wanted to see it?

But then again, there was nothing quite like having a broadband connection on election eve to follow the results in ways I never could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago.  Go to nytimes.com and there's this nifty little map that just keeps updating itself, refresh it, refresh refresh refresh.  Once upon a time you had 3 networks, and if Walter Cronkite said "but we haven't gotten a lot of the vote from eastern Freedonia where Groucho's support is the biggest so Harpo's lead may or may not be safe..." we had to take his word.  Now every three minutes I can look for myself and see not just that it's 40% in Indiana but that means it's 2% in the northeast corner and 58% in central, and then I can look again.  And look again.  And look again.  And waste time looking again, and refreshing, and then I can switch over to looking at the senate map, or the house map, or the governor map, and then it's five more minutes which means the president map has surely refreshed again.  Pull down, refresh, pull down, refresh, spend an evening.

So who needs the dead trees when you have all those live wires?

But  yet, but yet...  It's a really really big world out there, and do any of us know all of the hot congressional races, or the interesting ballot measures?  The news is there for us to find, but maybe we still need the newspaper to have those four pages of fine type from each state in each region to tell us what we didn't even realize we needed to know.  Did you watch your Campaign 2008 coverage on Fox News or MSNBC?  It wasn't the same campaign on both of them.  It's so easy on the internet to cocoon with the like-minded and see what you want to see instead of what maybe you need to.  There's no commonality in the society and the culture, that fracturing of the audience into its little slices where we have 189 channels to choose from.

Several elections back, I purchased 2 copies of the NY Times.  This was back in the day when they still printed the paper in Manhattan and the first and very early edition would be available by 10PM from a vending machine in the lobby of the Times building on W 43rd St. in the heart of the theatre district, walked over and almost still wet from the presses.  And there would be so much election news the next day, so why not buy one paper at 10PM and read everything else, and then get another with a later deadline the next morning where I could just linger over the election coverage.  This year I could sit at my computer and read all the coverage of anything that I could possibly want from the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the LA Times, and anywhere, really.  It's better, but it's worse.

This is a grim time for the print media.  The LA Times is taking the hatchet again with a newsroom half the size of what it was.  The Star Ledger in Newark is cutting its staff by 40%.  Gannett had a round of layoffs.  Oops there goes 20% of the review hole from my weekly Variety so it's internet or bust to keep up on movies and plays the way I used to in those halcyon days of May 2008.  Many papers had double-digit circulation drops though in some instances purposeful as they cut back their distribution area or tried to get rid of lower rent subscribers.  I worry about this, about not having that common source of news that hits 30% or 50% of the homes in a metropolitan area, of not having a newspaper to dig up Charlie Rangel's 4 rent-controlled apartments or the 95% of retired Long Island Rail Road employees getting disability.  

But dang that map is nifty.  Maybe if I go back now I can see if Coleman or Franken has harvested 2 more absentee votes.  But I so want those 4 pages of fine print tomorrow...

The Movies of Octoberone

August and September were very busy months for me; I managed to squeeze in several movies in August but September I saw only 2, which is amazingly low for me.  Many years ago when I had more leisure I saw around 120 movies a year, and even now I still average close to 2 per week.  2 per month, though, yikes!  And those I went to because I was able to see free screenings courtesy of Variety Screening Series and Museum of the Moving Image.  And of those 2, I wish I hadn't wasted my time at Blindness.  Sadly, Frozen River and Traitor are two movies I wish I'd seen that came and went before I could get to see.  But as I've slowly dug out from underneath I've been able to balance movies and work and some forward progress in my reading pile for work with several movies.

Ghost Town, seen at the Regal Kaufman Astoria, aud. #8, 1 slithy toad.

Eagle Eye, also at the Kaufman, #4, 3 slithy toads.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist at the AMC Empire, aud #18, 1 toad.

Religulous @ the Empire #19, 2.5 toads

Lakeview Terrace at the AMC Loews 34th St., #11, 2.5 toads

Appaloosa at the 34th St. #5, 1.5 toads

Towelhead at the City Cinemas Angelika, #5, 1 toad, or 3 toads, or 2 toads, or I don't know how many

Office Space at the AFI Silver #1, 2.5 toads

Burn After Reading at the Landmark Bethesda Row #3, 2 slithy toads

The Pool at the Landmark E St. Cinemas #6, 1.5 toads

From worst to best...

Ghost Town and Nick and Norah both share the same flaw, that they're so flat and so essentially dull that I decided to take a nap during each.  While the reviews on both were mixed, both did have their share of positive notices, and I just can't figure out why.  The kinds of screwball comedies Ghost Town tries to channel were fleet and fast and sophisticated.  This movie thinks sophistication requires no more than Greg Kinnear in a tux.  Ricky Gervais is like a 45 playing as a 33.  During the moments I was awake, I kept wondering why none of the ghosts had died in their PJs.  Don't many people die in their sleep, yet all of them died at work or home.  Or did they get a change of clothes on their way to Ghost Town?  Why did Andrew Wheeler like Ghost Town?  Were the parts I slept through that much better?  Nick and Norah tries to channel something like Scorcese's After Hours only done by way of teen romantic comedy, only there's no chemistry between Michael Cera and Kat Denning, whose smile seems torturously forced throughout.  They try kind of so hard to be NYC hip and film in NYC but the ending makes no sense because the 5th Avenue address would be some upscale apartment building where I'm positive Where's Fluffy will not be found.  They discriminate against bookstores by filming at the corner of 8th St. and Avenue of the Americas but away from the B&N where Brandon Sanderson will be signing and only toward the Gray's Papaya.  

Appaloosa gets 1.5 toads.  I'd kind of like to give it at least 2 because the cast has so many people worth seeing, but at the end of of the day and as amiable as it is there's just no point to it, and I have to be a little harsh.  There's also voice-over narration at the beginning and end, and the lines at the end I hated.  They insist on declaiming what any reasonably intelligent watcher of the movie should be able to get from the film itself, which reflects either a lack of confidence by the filmmaker or a lack of respect for the audience's intelligence.  The Pool also gets 1.5 toads.  My sister really liked it, so I decided I could see it while I was down in DC before my train back, and then I read her second e-mail "remember we have different tastes in movies and you won't like this," and she was right about that.  Set in India.  Nice teenager working at a hotel doing maid work and handyman work and etc.  Friends with a slightly younger boy who works at a restaurant.  There's a pool house next to the hotel, older boy falls for the daughter of the family that visits from a bigger city for the summer.  They have adventures with and without the younger kid who may be somewhat jealous, summer ends and lives have changed.  There's some nice cultural stuff going on, but I feel as if this same movie if done as Amerindie cinema wouldn't go anywhere and that the people who like it including not only my sister but also Stephen Holden in the NY Times are giving it extra credit because it's shot in India and thus exotic.  For my part I think 1 toad might be more like it, but out of respect for my sister's opinion I've given it a half-toad raise.

Burn After Reading is worth seeing and worth not seeing, hence 2 toads.  Considering I don't like the Coen Brothers all that much, this counts as a rave.  Basically, the cast is really good, with George Clooney and Brad Pitt and John Malkovich and Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton and JK Simmons, so it's fun to watch on that account.  The critics have lambasted it in some instances (and certainly by comparison to their usual unadulterated encomiums of praise for the Coen Bros) because they say it's not likeable, but that's more often a problem in the movies the critics like than in this one which they liked less.  It's very hard not to like a Brad Pitt or George Clooney, and none of the cast are working overtime at being unloveable in this movie.  More accurate to say that the movie drifts along until it reaches a random ending after a lot of random plot events.

Religulous and Lakeview Terrace are both a tad above average on my toad scale.  Lakeview Terrace is directed by Neil LaBute, whose plays I've often loved (The Shape of Things, Fat Pig) but who is less consistently successful on stage.  The script is co-written by playwright Howard Korder whose 1988 drama Boys' Life has just been revived in NYC.  It has elements of cheesier landlord/tenant horror thrillers like Pacific Heights but overall does I think hold to a slightly higher plane in putting within the context of race relations and parenting and other more issue-related angles.  Another movie  that gets points for having good cast members; Samuel L. Jackson is a plus in even the most negative-filled movie.

I'm not sure why I'm not giving Religulous a higher rating.  Though I attend Sabbath service more often than not over the course of the year I am very wary of the extremes in pretty much any and every religion which can meet on the left and right in some very scary places, which is ultimately Maher's point.  His interview at a company that specializes in making "shomer shabbas" products for Jews resonates very deeply with me.  Under Jewish law there are lots of specific things you can't do on the sabbath, but because some of these can be very inconvenient even many very religious Jews can find many ways to try and circumvent.  When if ever can you go so far to try and circumvent the rule as to in fact be breaking it?  When if ever can you go so far as to make a mockery of the self-righteousness that some very observant Jews have toward those who are less so?  These can be real issues in my family where there are five siblings who received very similar backgrounds in Judaism but who go thru life now at every point on the scale from agnosticism/atheism to orthodoxy.  One example to me is a concept known as an "eruv."  You can't carry things outside your home on Shabbat, but there is this idea that if you put a very big string around something you can define it as your home.  The Jewish summer camp I went to had this eruv strung up around its whole grounds and it would be checked every Friday afternoon to be sure it was intact, and in that context it seemed not an unreasonable thing, but it does strike me as unreasonable to have an eruv around the entire island of Manhattan.  So some rabbis say the whole idea is ridiculous, some say if you can have an eruv you can have one as big as you please, I'm in the middle, and we're all reading the same source material.  In the Religulous section, the company shows off a phone with a special Shabbas phone that dials all the numbers constantly, so when you hit a number you stop the phone from dialing which somehow makes the number dial which somehow makes it OK.  My religion isn't the only one that presents questions like these.  How do you buy a house if your religion forbids mortgage interest?  The Washington Post has had some articles on this topic which I'd link to except they're buried in a pay-to-access archive.  I love the topic, watching Real Time With Bill Maher is one of the nice side benefits of needing HBO for True Blood, and I like the movie, but I just don't love it.

I feel awkward to give Eagle Eye the same rating as Rachel Getting Married because they're so different and one is like so clearly an entry in the good movie sweepstakes.  But Eagle Eye succeeds every bit as admirably in its efforts as Rachel Getting Married, and I enjoyed both quite a bit.  Eagle Eye does borrow from a zillion other fllms ranging from Enemy of the State to 2001 to multiple Alfred Hitchcock to Wanted (well, it couldn't have borrowed from that since it wasn't released).  Unlike the movie Stargate, which borrows from 12 other movies in a boring kind of a way, Eagle Eye does it in a lively and energetic way.  It has Shia LaBeouf who really does deserve to be the next big thing that he's becoming.  I've liked him so much where I have seen him that I've come to regret not seeing Holes.  There's real chemistry between him and Michelle Monaghan, unlike what we find in Nick and Norah.  It's all very ludicrous but I was entertained entirely throughout, and it gives value more money.

I think I may do a full separate post on Towelhead, which is a little too interesting to get a quick paragraph at the bottom here.

Rachel Getting Married

Seen Monday evening September 29, 2008 at the Landmark Sunshine, Auditorium #1, 3 Slithy Toads

I was so quick to post negatively about the first film I saw in this year's Variety Screening Series that I should have been much quicker to enthuse about Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married."  But better late than never.

Jonathan Demme's had a very uneven career as a director, from the excellent and energetic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and film adaptation of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, on to Married to the Mob and Something Wild (not bad, though others love more than I), continuing to The Silence of the Lambs and the excellent Philadelphia to The Truth About Charlie remake (which I love more than others) to a remake of The Manchurian Candidate (which needed better tighter editing; even scene seemed to last a beat too long making it rather a chore) and now to Rachel Getting Married, which I think might be up there with Philadelphia as his best narrative motion picture.

Much like Philadelphia is and will always be known for the excellent central performance of Tom Hanks, Rachel Getting Married will be known for the excellent central performance of Anne Hathaway.  Sadly so, almost, because just as Philadelphia boasts a slew of excellent supporting performances, like Mary Steenburgen's delicious performance as the evil attorney, Hathaway's star turn will likely overshadow the excellence of the cast up and down the line here.

But goodness is Anne Hathaway good!  She plays Kym, the sister of the eponymous Rachel, whose wedding weekend it is.  We know from the conversation in the car ride up to the wedding in ritzy Stamford CT with her father that there's something a little awry with Kim, which we'll soon enough find out is her drug dependency.  All of the other reviews I've read mention that she's on a weekend furlough for the wedding, but this seems to be the kind of thing you pick up from the press kit that isn't so well described in the film itself.  There's another secret about Kym that's a little more important and a little better hidden that's revealed slowly and gently, a line of dialogue here and a photo there and a plate in yonder kitchen cabinet.  And is it Kym's fault that her mother and father have split up, the mother ephereally and ephemerally played by Debra Winger in a nice supporting turn that (to continue with my comparison) isn't unlike the late-career glimpse of Joanne Woodward as Tom Hanks' mother in Philadelphia.  The father's played by Bill Irwin, who is perhaps better known to we  New Yorkers for some of his Broadway clowning.  He uses every bit of his expressiveness to convey the uncertainties of his own balancing act on the wedding weekend, and Rosemarie DeWitt's Rachel is similarly expert showing sometimes with raised voice but often with her face just what's it like to have to deal with Kym on a weekend that ought to be about her.  Both also have to ac with a lot of delicacy, because we're going to look at things they do before we find out Kym's other little secret and ask just how well they fit.

Films like this can sometimes be difficult for me, because I'm not fond of addictive personalities, and I don't enjoy seeing what people can do when they're drugged up or drunk.  I'm a little more tolerant of varieties of drugged up because I've seen less of that in my own life, so thank heavens it's drugs here and not drunks which in high school and elsewhere I've had my fill of.  Furthermore, there's nothing very glorious about Anne  Hathaway, other than that she's absolutely and totally magnetic to watch even as she does and says the darnedest and damnedest things on occasion.  And it's just a magnificent performance, definitely an Oscar contender.  She's hurt and hurtful, cuddly and hateful and hateable all at the same time.

The centerpiece of the movie might be a rehearsal dinner capped by a toast by Kym. We were told in the post-film Q&A that all of the script (by Jenny Lumet, the daughter of the noted director Sydney Lumet) is in the movie and that 90% of the movie is in the script but a good chunk of the 10% that's improvisation is contained in this long section.  Kym's toast is a cringe-worthy moment in the best possible way, because we're not sure where Kym is going or what she's going to say, and it's early enough with enough left unsaid about Kym to this point that what she does say can be looked at a lot of different ways and then maybe in six more when you talk about the movie afterward.  It's selfishly gracious, or is it graciously selfish?  Later on, with all cards on the table, there's a scene between Debra Winger and Anne Hathaway that's also devastatingly well done. 

This isn't a perfect film.  The stuff about Kym that's better found in the press notes than the movie is one small reason for that.  A bigger one that results in the deduction of half a toad is the very self-indulgent wedding reception.  Demme likes his music, so the film is filled with music and musicians (in fact, all the music in the film is sourced, on a radio or there live or such instead of scored), and they're all at the wedding reception.  And since they're all there, they must be shown.  Even though the dramatic climax of the film has already been reached, and we've had our wedding, and we're hungry for the epilogue.  And this just drags on.  And on.  And on.  And on.  And on some more.  

Perfect, no.  But very very good.  Often in ways that American films simply aren't good at being good at any more, and at the same time mostly without falling prey to some of the cliches of Amerindie cinema.  

True Blood, True Life

One of my pet peeves in movies and TV shows has to do with funeral scenes.  I don't have a "funeral suit" in my closet, some black suit with a black tie and a white shirt that I can drag out on a day's notice in the unfortunate and unwanted event that I need to mark someone's passing. Do you?  Yet it's this awful cliche in Hollywood that the real world is full of people young and old who either have that special suit in their closet or run out and buy.  You look at a group of mourners, and they're all there in a funeral suit.  I'm not going to go to a funeral in my gaudiest ensemble, but nor am I going to go in a black suit with a white shirt and a black tie.

So three cheers for Episode #6 of True Blood.  There's a funeral in this episode, and the characters are dressed like actual real people at most of the actual funerals of real people I've attended in my life.  One of the relatives is in a suit, but it's a blue suit with a loose tie.  A friend of the family is in an ensemble that looks like the kind of thing the character might actually have had in his closet.  Some of the people aren't wearing ties at all.  They're dressed respectfully,appropriately, but not like a lazy falsified version of the real world.  

And I'm a little bit biased about True Blood, obviously .

As an aside, and in response to a commenter from last week, yes, Borders does have an endcap for Charlaine Harris now, running thru the end of November, and has ordered lots and lots of books and even put in lots and lots of reorders as books sold over the first few days of the promotion; Barnes & Noble stores have gotten six-packs of the backlist and some may have a floor riser, but for a lot of these stores that might be only a one-week supply and after that I'm not so sure.  A Sookie box set will be out for the holidays!

Biased, but easy enough just to blog about other things and ignore if not for the fact that I'm really liking the show.  Charlaine had gotten a DVD of the first five episodes and told me the show got better with each one, and ya know, she's right.  Episode #4 had some squirmy funny business going on with Jason that I couldn't bare to watch and yet couldn't avoid enjoying.  Episode #5 was a tight rope act with some scenes that were really funny mixed with some scenes that had very strong emotional pull to them and the balance was just right.  Episode #6 was more tightly focused on the immediate ramifications of the death that cliff-hung at the end of the prior episode, but suffice to say that the funeral dress is far from the only thing worth praising.  We're seeing more and more of Jason's darker side so I'm loving him less than I was at the start, but that's a reflection of the approach to the character.  Anna Paquin has been superlative and continues to be spot-on.  Bill is growing on me.  

Six more episodes to go, the season finale slated for Nov. 23, and if things continue on this level I'll have a lot to give thanks for come Nov. 27.

Notes & Comments

The e-book revolution is finally starting to arrive, this time legitimately for real.  The royalties I received from Penguin at the start of October were around 15% attributable to e-book sales, and several books had sold hundreds of e-book copies, a good deal of which are attributable to the Kindle. Compared to a mass market paperback, e-book royalty rates are higher and the e-book dollars are disproportionate to the actual number of copies sold.  However, if the e-book revolution eventually leads to $10 e-books selling instead of $25 hardcovers it will lead to a loss in revenue to the Author.  The Sony Reader is coming out in a new and improved edition, which will still retain its Mac-unfriendliness but allow annotations and note-taking as currently on the Kindle.  There have also been glimpses of a 2nd-generation Kindle which may arrive in early 2009.  

The NY Times reports that consumer spending is down.  Bookstores are not immune to this, alas.  Looking over the Nielsen Bookscan numbers for JABberwocky over the past couple weeks, a lot of backlist titles seem to have fallen to record low sales weeks.  This is not a good thing.

At least here, we are able to enjoy the Charlaine Harris phenomenon.  7 Sookie Stackhouse books on the NY Times list this week, 7 again next week.  The odd thing is that this is happening even though the books can be hard to find in stores.  It looks like this will begin to settle down in the next week or two; Borders as an example is putting huge reorders in to stock an endcap that will last thru November, and I'm told B&N has floor displays to come.  Still, it's been an odd thing the past month to have so many books on the bestseller list without having the visual component of seeing them in large glorious quantity on shelves.